


mercies small

by winchestersinthedrift



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alzheimer's Disease, Angst, Dementia, Gen, Samulet, Wincest - Freeform, if - you - squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2016-11-06
Packaged: 2018-08-29 11:12:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8487136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winchestersinthedrift/pseuds/winchestersinthedrift





	

Dean gets early-onset Alzheimer’s when he’s 49. That’s the doctors’ best guess, at least, and Sam makes sure they get three, four, five opinions, under the names they’ve got the best insurance coverage for. It progresses fast, which is maybe a mercy. Sam doesn’t know anymore. He hopes, he thinks it’s one for Dean, puts an end to the months he knows exactly what’s coming and has to wait for it. Helpless. 

They don’t just sit. Dean won’t let Sam take him hunting, not when he can’t trust the fibrous nets of nerve between his temples, but they go back to a couple of places where Dean feels like being, go fishing, look over the edge of the Hoover Dam. They stop for a night at Lost Creek, wander out to the edge of the woods and kick weeds along the highway. Dean wants to eat a bullet there, but he isn’t gonna do it without telling Sam and Sam won’t let him, clocks him in the side of the head and holds him down in the gravel beside the Impala till he promises. 

‘There might be a cure,’ Sam says, hours later, back on the highway, when they’re both bruised and aching and cried out. Dean just sets his jaw and brushes his knuckles across Sam’s forearm. 

Once things get bad Sam can’t calm him down anymore. He’ll find Dean in the library running his hands over the tables, over their corners and legs, agitated, angry, getting splinters in fingers that are growing soft and uncalloused. Some nights he startles awake in the cot next to Dean’s bed and hears him breathing harsh and fluttery like a hunted animal, back forced up against the headboard, fingers wound in the sheets. Sam’s hands on him help, and that’s OK, Sam’s OK with that. But it’s not, it’s maybe, he wonders just how long that’ll be enough. 

One night in the pitchy predawn when Dean’s hair is silver gossamer in the moonlight Sam goes, finally, to the box under his bed and pulls out the amulet, not the one from the show but the real one. _So this is how it ends up happening_ , he thinks, and grips it so hard the horns of the little god dig into his palm. He’s imagined giving it back to Dean a hundred times, a thousand, but it’s never seemed quite right, not quite. But any of them were better than this. 

The teeth in his chest soften their gnawing, a little, when he sees it against Dean’s chest, the burnished metal heavy against the grey of Dean’s chest hair. Sam lets his fingers linger a little, drag over Dean’s tattoo. 

Dean looks down. 

‘Samuel!’ he says, gruff, himself, blinking surprise. 

Sam cries.


End file.
